OREANDA-NEWS. John Wood Group PLC ("Wood Group" or "the Group"), issues the following pre-close trading update for the six months to 30 June 2015. Results for the first half will be released on 18 August 2015.

Trading performance

Financial performance in the first half of 2015 will demonstrate the relative resilience and flexibility of our asset-light, predominantly reimbursable model, but will be down on the first half of 2014 reflecting challenging conditions in oil and gas markets. To help offset the impact of lower activity and pricing pressure, we are delivering savings significantly in excess of original targets from our cost reduction initiatives, and continue to focus on utilisation. We remain confident that our market leading businesses and breadth of capability position us well to deliver for our customers. There is no change to overall guidance and we continue to anticipate that full year EBITA will be broadly in line with analyst consensus.

Engineering

Upstream activity levels remain subdued, however we have seen a good contribution from larger detailed engineering projects including Det Norske's Ivar Aasen in the Norwegian North Sea and Hess Stampede in the Gulf of Mexico. In the second quarter, we started FEED work on our six year Offshore Maintain Potential contract with Saudi Aramco awarded in March. The current high volume of pre-FEED, FEED and concept work includes a number of leading global offshore developments and is a positive indicator of future activity levels, although the timing of sanction of detailed engineering scopes remains uncertain.

Our subsea business has been active on larger projects for BP in the Caspian and the North Sea, Zadco in Abu Dhabi, Tullow in Ghana and Chevron in Australia. However, activity levels have reduced and we are seeing fewer large subsea capex projects coming to market. Recent new awards include FEED for Woodside in Australia and for Talisman in Vietnam and a five year maintenance contract for subsea well control as part of a joint industry project.

Our onshore pipelines business is performing robustly in the US where customers are looking to improve transportation to downstream facilities, and is delivering engineering and construction management services for customers including Energy Transfer Company and Dow.

Our downstream, process and industrial activities are also performing well, in part due to the impact of lower feedstock prices. Following the successful completion of early stage engineering on a refinery modification project for Flint Hills Resources in the Eagle Ford region, we have recently been awarded the detailed engineering, procurement and construction support scope.

Wood Group is an international energy services company with over \$7bn sales. The Group is built on our Core Values and has two reporting segments – Wood Group Engineering and Wood Group PSN - providing a range of engineering, production support and turbine services to the oil & gas, and power sectors.